best to dwell on it. But you can't help yourself, at night. I can smell
Becky's fresh bread, in my dreams, just out of the brick oven. Never eat
bread cooked in a stove till I came out here. I never drunk any water like
that spring on the ridge. Last night I was back there, and the maples were
all yellow like sunshine. Once it was spring, and apple-blooms up in the
hill orchard. And little Emmy, a-setting on the fence, with her bunnit
throwed back on her neck. 'Addy!' she called, way across the lot; 'Addy,
come, help me down!' She was a master hand for venturin' up on places, but
she didn't like the gettin' down.

"Well, she 'a learned the ups and downs by this time. She don't need Addy
to help her. I'd have helped a big sight more if I had kep' my distance.
It's a thing so con-demned foolish and unnecessary--I can't be reconciled
to it noway!"

"You see only one side of it," said Paul. Unspeakable thoughts had kept
pace with his father's words. "Nothing that happens, happens through
us--or to us--alone. There was a girl I knew, outside. She was as happy,
when I knew her first, as you say my mother used to be. Then she met some
one--a man--and the shadow of his life crossed hers. He would have wrapped
her up in it and put out her sunshine if he had stayed in the same world.
Now she can be herself again, after a while. It cannot take long to forget
a person you have known only a little over a year."

The packer rose on one elbow. He reached across and shook his son.

"Where is that girl? Answer me! Take your face out of your hands!"

"At Bisuka Barracks. She is the commandant's daughter. I came out to marry
her."